I’ve always had a history of looking at the MMO I’m playing and talking about some of the things I’d love to add. It is just something fun for me but I usually try to keep those requests in the practical realm. Epic Pet Wars is shaping up to be a fine iPhone MMORPG and I wanted to talk about some of the directions Miraphonic could go in to make the game a bit more complex and exciting. Recently they added critical strike chance and an occasionally active crafting system and those were big hits. What else could they do to expand the game?
The first thing I’d like to see are additional statistics. At the moment there just aren’t enough to allow a diverse set of options. Pets only have an attack and defense value. The recent addition of critical strike chance gives you something else to work on but you’re still pretty much just going out and getting as much attack as possible. For a game like this you obviously don’t want to make things overly complex but I think there could be a bit more than just two main statistics, especially when the game has functions in place that could allow for it.
Epic Pet Wars offers the pet the ability to purchase spells and use them. In general they’re fairly powerful and are similar to debuffs in standard MMORPGs. I never find them necessary to use in battle with another pet, though. I can simply overcome them with melee prowess. For the boss fights, however, I don’t see how you could get by without them. It seems a shame to waste such a great system to such a small role. If there were “magic attack” and “magic defense” statistics players might gear their pet more towards magic use. Magic attack could strengthen the effect of the spells while magic defense would weaken them. You could also have critical chance affect them as well. Doing this would open up a new way to play and probably bring some more folks on board.
I would also like to see some sort of honor system put in the game. Right now you’re rewarded for getting as many battle victories as possible. It doesn’t matter if you defeat your opponent in one hit, you won! It would be great if the game could check gear levels and reward you better for defeating challenging opponents. You could gain honor by doing so and spend that on additional items. As it stands now your greatest reward comes from defeating the weakest pets as fast as possible and I think that might be defeating the purpose of playing. The risk vs reward is pretty well off. Perhaps your pet would have its mood reduced if you just bully little folks?
The posse your pet puts together is another interesting thing that I feel is under utilized. This is another situation where quantity is more important than quality. It doesn’t matter who you find, just find folks and jam them in there. The more you have the higher your rank and the access to more jobs you get. It would be interesting if Miraphonic could do something else with the posse. This is one of those things where I am asking for a stretch but it would be interesting to have a pack system for Epic Pet Wars. You could start your own pack and invite members of your posse to join it. By doing so they may give you a bonus to your earned income and you give them a bonus to a statistic of your choice. They could then invite pack members under themselves to do the same and you get a benefit as well. Essentially it would be a pyramid scheme. It would make players a bit more choosey about who they join, though. If the bonus is weak or they want to be higher up they’ll go elsewhere. It is just a thought really. As of 19 February your posse size helps determine who goes first in a battle!
I would also like to see some sort of system where if you unequip an item it doesn’t charge its full rent amount. While this sounds abusable I really don’t think it is. Perhaps unequipped items could only charge you half of their upkeep so you could actually keep things if you get them before the appropriate level. Upkeep in general doesn’t quite feel right to me since there are outrageous amounts of levels between investments and each investment is worse than the prior. The effect of diminishing returns really is in effect here!
The game also seems to stall a bit after level 165. Weapons and armor occasionally upgrade but usable items, spells, accessories and investments really become non-existant. I’m not certain how you can even keep your cash flow at a positive level without accepting inferior gear which will ultimately set you up for continued losses in the battle system. I realize that not a lot of players will have the dedication to get into those levels but since the game does scale to 200 I’d like every part of it to. I’ve have come up against this before though and after an update things got a bit smoother.
One big thing that Epic Pet Wars lacks is a proper wolf pet! We have all sorts of animals and strange creatures but where is the wolf? Come on now, we need a wolf! At any rate I’m still playing a whole lot of Epic Pet Wars and I recommend to anyone who hasn’t downloaded it yet to do so. I know the 1.7 build will be done shortly and I’m interested to see what changes. If you’d like to join my posse use the code kremolb and the redeem code payssjeu to earn you and I a few respect points!
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